Many surveillance stations employ multiple surveillance technologies. These technologies include passive and active detection systems, including acoustic, electric, image, image differential, seismic, thermal, to name a few. Many surveillance stations are built in places not readily accessible to human interference. For example, among borders containing relatively light population and desolate environmental conditions, electronic data gathering is crucial for continued surveillance activities.
In some situations, the data collection sensors are placed in a geographic area. These data collection sensors can feed information to a centralized transmission station, from which the data is relayed to an operations center. In the operations center, the data is observed and acted upon.
In many situations it is hard to reset alarm values for sensor readings, or communicate with the data gathering devices. Communication may be hard since many different sensors are involved, and the communication legs to the sensors may be haphazard, at best.